Tennessee prepares to execute Christa Pike, first woman put to death in the state in over 200 years

Barring a last-minute reprieve from Gov. Bill Lee, Tennessee is set to execute Christa Gail Pike by lethal injection on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. If it goes forward, Pike, now 50, will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the only person executed in the state's modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at 18, 19 or 20.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has set the execution for 10 a.m. Central time on Sept. 30, and has already selected the media witnesses who will attend. Pike's lawyers have filed a 226-page clemency petition asking Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole, backed by an amicus brief from trauma experts, letters of support from more than 100 advocacy organizations and a formal appeal from United Nations human rights experts. The Tennessee Supreme Court, meanwhile, has rejected her final court challenges, including a 23-page ruling on Sept. 23 that found she was unlikely to prevail on claims that a blood-clotting disorder would make lethal injection unconstitutionally painful.

A killing on a Job Corps campus

Pike was 18 on Jan. 12, 1995, when she and two teenage friends from the Knoxville Job Corps program lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow trainee, to a wooded lot near the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus. According to trial testimony, Pike cut Slemmer's throat with a box cutter, struck her with a meat cleaver, carved a pentagram into her chest and crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt, then took a piece of the victim's skull as a keepsake.

Two co-defendants were also involved. Tadaryl Shipp, then 17 and Pike's boyfriend, was too young under state law to face the death penalty; he received a life sentence and is now eligible for parole. Shadolla Peterson, 18 at the time, testified against Pike and Shipp and was sentenced to probation. Pike alone was charged capitally, and a Knox County jury sentenced her to death in 1996.

An outlier sentence

Pike's clemency petition, filed with the governor's office, argues that her death sentence is statistically unusual even by Tennessee's own record. Of the 17 people Tennessee has executed in the modern era, the petition says, the average age at the time of the crime was just under 29, and the youngest was 23. Seven other Tennessee defendants sentenced to death for crimes committed at 18 have since had their sentences vacated on appeal, leaving Pike as the only remaining death-row inmate in the state for a crime committed at that age.

The petition also lays out a history of childhood trauma that Pike's attorneys say went unaddressed for years: sexual abuse by her grandmother's boyfriend beginning at age 2, a rape by a neighbor at 11 whose attacker was arrested but never imprisoned, and a rape by a stranger at 17, months before the killing. It cites her mother's alcohol use during pregnancy as a factor in documented frontal-lobe brain damage, and says Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after decades in custody, most of it spent in solitary confinement on the state's death row for women. Notably, prosecutors have not disputed the abuse allegations; during an August hearing on Pike's lethal-injection challenge, the Tennessee Attorney General's Office told the court it did not contest the abuse she suffered.

Courts clear the way, clemency remains open

Pike's legal team has spent months challenging the state's execution protocol on separate grounds, arguing that a blood disorder called thrombocytosis could cause complications during lethal injection that would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. A court-appointed special master and, ultimately, the Tennessee Supreme Court's order setting her execution date rejected that argument, and the court's Sept. 23 opinion found she had not shown a substantial likelihood of success on any of her Eighth Amendment claims.

That leaves clemency as Pike's only remaining avenue. Under Tennessee law, the governor has sole authority to commute a death sentence, and is not bound by any recommendation from the Board of Parole. Pike's attorney, Kelly Gleason, framed the decision in stark terms.

"The governor now has an opportunity to protect a victim of child rape and correct the mistakes of the adults, institutions and systems that consistently failed Christa as a child," Gleason said in a statement accompanying the petition.

In her own written statement included in the filing, Pike described a slow reckoning with the crime: "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime."

Advocates and a rare UN intervention

Support for clemency has drawn an unusual mix of voices. M. Christopher Coffey, the attorney who represented Shipp at trial, submitted a letter arguing that the gap between his client's life sentence and Pike's death sentence stemmed "from their slight age difference, rather than their respective role in this crime." Sexual-violence and trauma specialists filed an amicus brief warning that the physical procedures involved in an execution — restraint, exposure, loss of bodily autonomy — carry a "substantial risk" of re-traumatizing someone with Pike's abuse history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center's summary of the filings. More than 100 organizations that work on violence against women have also asked Lee to commute the sentence, and advocates rallied in Nashville this week to press the governor's office directly. Independent United Nations human rights experts issued a statement urging the United States and Tennessee to halt the execution, arguing it would cap "a trajectory of severe physical and psychological suffering" stretching from Pike's childhood through nearly three decades in solitary confinement.

Colleen Slemmer's family has not issued a public statement in the run-up to the execution date. Pike's conviction and sentence have been upheld through three decades of state and federal appeals, including a direct appeal the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected in 1998.

What happens next

Absent a stay from a federal court or a commutation from Lee, the execution will proceed as scheduled at 10 a.m. on Sept. 30, with seven media witnesses selected by the department under its standard drawing procedure. The governor's office has given no public indication of when, or whether, it will act on the clemency petition, and Tennessee governors have granted clemency in capital cases only rarely in recent decades. If the execution proceeds, Pike will be the third person executed in Tennessee this year and the first woman executed in the state since 1819, according to historical execution records, closing out a three-decade legal odyssey that began with a killing on a Knoxville college campus when she was still a teenager.